President Trump is at the brink of the biggest diplomatic accomplishment of his second term — a cessation of the brutal war between Israel and Hamas — and on Wednesday evening he made clear he was eager to fly to the Middle East to preside over a cease-fire and welcome hostages who have spent two long years in underground captivity.
For Mr. Trump, success in this venture is the ultimate test of his self-described goal as a deal maker and a peacemaker — and a pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize he has so openly coveted. By chance, the winner for 2025 is scheduled to be announced just hours before he may be departing to take his victory lap in Egypt and Israel.
If Mr. Trump can hold this deal together, if Hamas gives up its last 20 living hostages this weekend and with them its negotiating leverage, that would be an extraordinary step toward the kind of peace plan Mr. Trump, and his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., have pressed to accomplish, despite many diversions down dark holes. And if Mr. Trump can get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw troops from Gaza City and give up on his plan to take control of the shattered remains of Gaza, if he can stop the carnage that has killed 1,200 people in Israel and more than 60,000 Palestinians, he will have done what many before him tried: outmaneuvered a difficult and now isolated ally.
If the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have won the peace prize in the past, though with less bombast and lobbying. (They are Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, who was awarded one decades after he left the White House.)
But it is far from clear that the conflict is truly ending. Mr. Trump’s statements, and Mr. Netanyahu’s, referred only to the first step, the hostage-for-prisoner swaps and the withdrawal of Israeli troops to a yet-to-be-described line. Getting to the next stage, where Hamas would have to give up its arms and, even harder, its claim to run Gaza, may prove even more difficult than bringing the living and dead hostages home. Hamas may well balk at the next steps, and so may Mr. Netanyahu, who argues that the job will not be done until every Hamas combatant in the Oct. 7 attacks is hunted down. Any of those could unwind the fragile cease-fire.